Gremlins (1984)

Santa's little anti-helpers

B-Movie Tea

Dec 23, 2025

December is the Month of Judgment!

Every calendar day of the twelfth month we dump truckloads of DVDs and VHS tapes into the ocean.

Those that sink are declared innocent.

Those that float are dredged, damned and set on fire.

But we won’t do that today, because today is the 23rd day of the Scarestack Society’s 25 Days of Slays.

My sincere thanks to Kyle Horrorble Writer for inviting me to take part in this Macabre Yuletide project and for providing me the opportunity to review my favorite Christmas movie, Gremlins.

Gremlins was the worst thing that happened to baby boomers in 1984. Millions of them were traumatized by the titular creatures, a fusion of the two things 80s parents feared their children might develop an affinity for, reptiles and punk rock.

And the very worst part of it all was that children loved Gremlins. They begged to see it in theatres twice. And then they begged for the dolls, action figures, stickers, breakfast cereals, video games and other pieces of marketing that burst out of the film like the mogwai’s sopping wet offspring.

Children loved Gremlins as much as they had loved ET, but ET was not a movie that upset parents.

ET did not feature scenes where people are defenestrated, run over with snow plows or partially eaten.

To be fair, in the early 80s ET was a bit of an outlier for not featuring that sort of violence, but Gremlins still pushed the envelope for what was considered PG-appropriate. The movie had blenders, microwaves and Christmas trees all used as murder weapons, horror that had not been matched even by the most inventive slasher films of the era.

And then there’s that monologue Phoebe Cates has near the end. Which for a while became a popular audition piece.

Baby boomers who oversaw mid-80s admissions for RADA, Juilliard and Tisch, were forced to relive their Gremlins trauma constantly as scores of aspiring actresses introduced themselves and then began to recite that notorious story about why Phoebe Cates didn’t celebrate Christmas.

Gremlins is a very unusual horror movie. It makes kids laugh and terrifies adults.

But is it a Christmas movie?

Many would say that dwelling on such questions is to miss the magic of Gremlins, but people who say such things are not your friends. They are a motley assortment of beings who want to destroy you.1

So do not listen to any voice that tells you it doesn’t matter what kind of movie Gremlins is. As Father Merrin once said to Father Karras, ‘DO NOT LISTEN!”

Today, we will seize Gizmo by his oversized ears and scream into his face until the question is answered. Is Gremlins a Christmas movie or not?

But first, the Plot: It’s going to be a white Christmas in Kingston falls, a Dickensian Pennsylvania town where many poor children do not attend school. Instead, they must cover themselves with pine branches and parade around mall parking lots to encourage the sale of Christmas trees.

One such wretch is named Pete (Corey Feldman) who frequently seeks food by constantly inviting himself into the home of the Peltzers.

The Peltzers are a nuclear family composed of Rand (Hoyt Axton) a moderately successful entrepreneur, Lynn (Frances Lee McCain) whose occupation is never mentioned2 and their son Billy (Zach Galligan) a bank teller and aspiring cartoonist.

Unlike Pete, Billy enjoys all the privileges of a coddled childhood, even though he’s at least 21. Rand has just bought him a fancy Christmas present, an exotic pet named ‘Gizmo’.

Gizmo is a Mogwai, a bipedal creature about the size of a gopher with big floppy ears. Gizmo is friendly, intelligent, can sing and even speak though he only does the latter sparingly3.

Gizmo is the coolest, but there are three very important rules to caring for him.

Don’t expose him to sunlight, which is lethal.
Don’t feed him after midnight
and….
Never get him wet.
Wouldn’t you know it, Pete immediately spills a cup of water on Gizmo who shrieks in agony and starts calving like a hairy iceberg. Gizmo survives, but all five chunks that fall off him turn into other Mogwais. One of them has a mohawk.

Obviously, this wears out Pete’s welcome and he is thrown back out on the street. Billy decides to rise to the occasion of raising six mogwai, but this proves to be difficult. The five new ones are different from Gizmo, they’re a lot meaner, especially the one with the punk hair.

Eventually they chew through the wires of Billy’s alarm clock to trick him into feeding them past midnight.

The next day, Billy wakes to discover five basketball sized cocoons on his bedroom floor.

He knows this probably isn’t good but decides he can wait until Christmas is over before dealing with it.

Alas, the pupae stage is brief and while Billy is trying to make overtime at the bank, the cocoons hatch and the Gremlins emerge.

Gremlins retain the mogwai’s basic body shape, but are twice as big, covered in green crocodile skin and have very sharp teeth.

They also have bigger appetites, are considerably more aggressive and just like the mogwai, they multiply in water.

“Stripe” the Gremlin with punk hair4 quickly finds his way to the local YMCA where he uses the pool and promptly increases the size of his family by 50,000% or so.

So, back to that question, is Gremlins a Christmas film?

The fact that it takes place during Christmas isn’t enough to make the answer, ‘yes’ especially since the movie was released during summer.

And it isn’t enough that the movie uses Christmas music so well, playing Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) through the opening credits and using “Do You Hear What I Hear” to terrifying effect when the newly hatched Gremlins are first visible.

What makes Gremlins a Christmas film is that it’s all about gifts. Not so much how to give them, but how to keep them.

Billy Peltzer means well, but he ultimately doesn’t have the strength and wisdom to care for Gizmo properly.

He does manage to get the Gremlin problem under control, but that is only with considerable help from Gizmo and the two women in his life, his Mom and Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates).

Billy’s Mom, Lynn, doesn’t seem very aggressive in the first half of the movie, but she’s the only one home when the Gremlins hatch. Initially, and several times in the ensuing combat, it seems like the little green monsters will defeat her, but she kills almost all of them and kills them with impressive brutality.

Kate is Billy’s co-worker at the bank. Billy’s kind of into her, but too oblivious to notice that the feelings are reciprocated. Lucky for Billy, when all hell breaks loose, Kate doesn’t panic or demand explanations, she simply picks up a weapon and starts fighting.

It’s true, she is eventually compelled to tell her grisly story about why her family stopped celebrating Christmas at a very inopportune time, but Billy would not have survived this movie without Kate’s help5

Gremlins is further Christmatized by a third woman in Billy’s life, the evil Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holliday)6 a “Mr. Henry Potter”-style Christmas villain. Deagle is served an appropriate fate by the Gremlins who kill her with her own fancy gadgets.

The Verdict: We find that Gremlins is a Christmas film not because of any of the things we just wrote, but because the main character’s name is Billy. Billy is also the name of the main characters in Black Christmas and Silent Night Deadly Night, so there you go, irrefutable proof of Gremlin’s Christmasness.

Thanks so much for reading, please remember to check back tomorrow when That Horror Lesbian, reviews the 2019 version of Black Christmas and check out the full Scarestack here:

12/1 Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Kyle (Horrorble Writer)
12/2 The Nightmare Before Christmas: Abandoned Places
12/3 Silent Night Deadly Night: Molly O’Blivion
12/4 Anna And The Apocalypse: H. H. Duke
12/5 Terrifier 3: Meat Head Media
12/6 The Advent Calendar: Sahar Writes
12/7 Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Stephen Duffy
12/8 Violent Night: @robopulp
12/9 The Lodge: Offscreenshaman
12/10 Mean One: Beverley’s Horror Corner
12/11 Silent Night: Skyla
12/12 It’s A Wonderful Knife: Thehumangaze
12/13 A Christmas Horror Story: Mike Duffy
12/14 Deadly Games/Dial Code Santa Claus: Hellish Views - Harry Evans
12/15 Black Christmas (2006): Blood, Blush, and Guts
12/16 Krampus: POP! Goes My Brain
12/17 Elves Emma
12/18 Santa Jaws: Sean Mo
12/19 Better Watch Out: Habitual Cinema
12/20 Rare Exports: The Macabre Tavern
12/21 Christmas Bloody Christmas: Horror Hangouts
12/22 Silent Night Deadly Night 2: Brandon Rae
12/23 Gremlins: B-Movie Tea
12/24 Black Christmas (2019): That Horror Lesbian
12/25 Black Christmas: Horror Concierge

Next Monday: The Worst Movies of 2025

Next Tuesday: The Best Movies of 2025

The Tea: One of the best things about the word ‘Gremlin’ was that it wasn’t invented by Chris Columbus, which means that anyone can use it and plausibly insist they are not trying to associate themselves with the movie, even though that is pretty much the only reason anyone uses the word. Adaigo sells a tea called “The Gremlin”.

The Snack: Whatever you want, but only after midnight. You know what Christmas food is particularly good after midnight? After-Eights!

Some are people who don’t even care about movies, apostates who would rather talk about real estate or twerking. Others are not even human, they are bots programmed to distract you while they gather data or infernal demons trying to pull your soul out through your liver.

But based on how we eventually see her behave, I suspect she’s a Navy SEAL

You would too if you sounded like Mr. Bill

yes, even though Stripe sheds all mammalian vestiges, he retains his bushy mohawk.

Billy is almost killed by one Gremlin who utilizes lawn darts and a baseball bat, Kate never lets any monster encounters escalate to that point.

Golden Age of Hollywood actress Polly Holliday is alright in this part, but it would have been so much better if Amblin spent whatever it cost to cast Bea Arthur or Carol Burnett.